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MAJOR-PARTY DEAL IN MEXICO TO BRING POLITICAL REFORMS

After 19 months of often bitter negotiations, Mexico's Government and ruling party late Thursday signed a sweeping agreement with the opposition parties aimed at eliminating electoral fraud, modernizing the political system and guiding the transition from seven decades of one-party rule.

The Mexican Congress today scheduled an extraordinary session for Tuesday to approve the 17 constitutional amendments and dozens of supplementary bills that will make the agreement law. Passage is considered a virtual certainty.

The reforms are likely to result in the election of larger numbers of opposition candidates in midterm elections next year and could in the year 2000 give the opposition a fair shot at the presidency, which the ruling party has never ceded in 12 successive elections dating to 1929.

The reforms will increase opposition party access to television time, set tighter controls on campaign spending, and for the first time fully eliminate ruling party control of election procedures and ballot-counting. Next year Mexicans will also for the first time directly elect the country's second most powerful official, the mayor of Mexico City, who throughout this century has been a presidential appointee.

Political experts here called the agreement a milestone in Mexico's democratic transition, begun in middle of the 1980's, from an authoritarian state ruled by a succession of all-powerful presidents who have picked their successors from among their colleagues in the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

Important tests of the Government's good faith will come during the next months as legislators negotiate the wording of specific electoral regulations and appoint some 2,000 officials to administer the elections next year, the political experts said.

"This reform begins a new stage in Mexico's history," said Santiago Creel, who helped organize Mexico's 1994 elections as a citizen counselor at the Federal Electoral Institute.

President Ernesto Zedillo, signing the pact with the presidents of Mexico's four main opposition parties late Thursday in the national palace, called it "a decisive step to insure that our elections take place under rules and institutions that guarantee their legality and transparency."

Mr. Zedillo convoked the negotiations in January 1995, partly to blunt the political damage from Mexico's worst economic crisis. He has faced opposition from hard-line elements in the PRI as well as intermittent opposition walkouts, which repeatedly slowed the 19-month negotiations.

"Without any doubt, this is President Zedillo's most important political accomplishment to date," said Luis Tellez, Mr. Zedillo's chief adviser.

The presidents of the four opposition parties represented in Congress hailed the agreement but warned that its practical effects will depend on whether the Government and PRI officials cooperate at election time.

For the reforms to work, Mr. Calderon said, the ruling party and the Government will have to demonstrate that they have "the political will to end, once and for all, the separation that exists in our country between law and fact, between rhetoric and reality."

One constitutional amendment will have an important effect in the United States by granting millions of Mexicans living north of the border the right to cast absentee ballots for President in 2000. That is likely to bring campaigning by Mexican presidential candidates in major emigrant settlements like Los Angeles and Chicago.

That measure, like many of the reforms, is a dramatic change that opposition leaders hope will strengthen their electoral chances because, they believe, emigrants could vote in large numbers against the ruling party.

Over the decades, the PRI has used many techniques to win federal, state and local elections, everything from outright ballot-rigging to monopolizing news coverage to diverting Government funds to ruling party campaigns.

"In this reform, the PRI concedes on almost all fronts, and the opposition gains," said Federico Estevez, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technical Institute in Mexico City.

One of most important new measures, Mr. Estevez said, will link Mexico's electoral machinery to the federal judiciary, which will for the first time allow the Supreme Court to intervene in electoral disputes. Previously the opposition has had few legal recourses.

Another new measure establishes that citizens must join political parties of their own free will. In the past, the PRI has enlisted thousands of "members" onto its rolls at the sweep of a pen, simply by affiliating whole union locals or peasant federations with the party.